“Inhuman” is how the International Committee for the Red Cross described a CIA prison program that made medical officers party to torture. The contents page alone is grim reading. Bulleted under the heading of “Other Methods of Ill Treatment” is a 12-point list that includes “suffocation by water,” “beating and kicking,” “confinement in a box,” “prolonged nudity,” and “deprivation/restricted provision of solid food.”

Part 3 of the report catalogs the role of medical officers in the methods listed above. While US agents employed enhanced interrogation techniques (Thanks Cheney! It is my favorite euphemism ever!) the Red Cross report says one prisoner “alleged that a health person threatened that medical care would be conditional upon cooperation with the interrogators.”

Going against all standards of ethical medical practice, doctors oversaw and sometimes participated in torture to “rule on permissibility, or not, of any form of physical or psychological ill-treatment.” Medical officers determined how much more pain a detainee could suffer while interrogated. One doctor told a prisoner, “I look after your body only because we need you for information.”

This is embarrassing for the United States, and embarrassing for the new administration. The maltreatment described above refers to late 2006 and Obama has suspended the use of torture as a tactic since taking office. But the fact remains that no one responsible for allowing (and in Cheney’s case, publicly endorsing) such gross violations of basic human rights has been reprimanded by the current government. As long as such hypocrisy exists while the truth keeps leaking out, the Obama administration will be condemned for its inaction.

Photo: Flickr courtesy of burge5000